For over a decade, entrepreneurs have struggled to fully harness the continually expanding influence of social media. According to recent polls, about 28 percent of all online activity is dedicated to social media consumption, so it should come as no surprise that 93 percent of marketers use social media for business. The importance of social media presence is taken as a given, basically granted as your first topic in Marketing 101.

The thing is, when we say “struggle,” we do mean struggle. It’s real. While Facebook, Twitter and Instagram icons pop up everywhere online from your favorite news outlet to bulk sock retailers, the business world continues to contemplate just how effective these efforts have been in spreading brand awareness, raising conversion rates, and establishing trust among consumers. As businesses continue to search for innovative ways to reach out online, the effectiveness of these efforts remains a contentious topic of debate. So where do we stand?

Mixed Figures & Mixed Results

Some of the current data is more than a little bit discouraging. Some studies suggest that the call of social media to enterprising marketers may be more of a siren song than a serenade. Both search and email deliver better conversion rates (2.04 percent and 2.18 percent) than social media (1.17 percent). This trend only gets worse when turning to e-commerce sales, where email and cost per click deliver (CPC) upwards of 15 percent compared to 1 percent for social media. Finally, in a list of factors influencing search rankings, social metrics place ninth out of nine, being outranked by a wide margin compared to link-features, keywords and content, traffic/query data, and other features.

The numbers paint a nasty picture, perhaps prompting you to rethink your social media strategy, but it’s not all so bleak. In 2014, 68 percent of Americans said that social networks had no influence on their buying decisions. That number dropped to 36 percent in 2015, with 47 percent of users singling out Facebook as having the greatest impact on purchase behavior. As it turns out, there just might be some hope.

Two things seem clear. The power of social media advertising has yet to be fully harnessed, and current trends highlight a disconnect between what users want and what businesses offer in their social media campaigns. On this topic, it’s worth asking why CPC and email outperform social media by such a wide margin. The most apparent answer is that most of us aren’t looking to shop when we log into Facebook or Twitter, but there’s more to it than that.

Vis-á-vis

Facebook’s slogan might as well be “Facebook: imagine your life as a commercial.” To elaborate, the ambiguously attributed quotation of the early 2000s has never been as true as it is today in the world of social media: “If you’re not paying, you’re the product.” Scores of users have tried to become products in their own right. From power users to casual browsers, creators to curators, social media is first and foremost a platform for active self-promotion. Regarding social interaction between individuals, every “like,” every comment, every hashtag, and every click is an endorsement of another product, creating a symbiosis of organic adspace.

Cost per click and email advertising are avenues where the traditional consumer-product relationship still applies. These purchases and endorsements are outside of the public eye, occurring exclusively between a customer and a company. This model, however, does not hold in the world of social media, so it should come as no surprise that approaching with the same marketing techniques does not yield the same results. Each individual social media user creates, in essence, a micro-brand of his or her own, which endorses and sponsors other users and content in an effort to establish itself. Traditional advertisements in social media are not only competing with each other. They are competing with the stream of self-promotion generated by the users themselves.

Shifting Tides

In the social media landscape, brand is everything. Certain traditional approaches still apply. Regardless of the source, if your promotion is funny, sexy or exciting enough, users will endorse your product as a statement about themselves. This idea of consumers defining themselves through products is hardly novel. To some extent, we all ask ourselves what our purchases say about us as people. The key difference is that in the real world, purchases have tangible counterparts. Regardless of how you market Doritos, your consumer will still experience and be seen eating a bag of cheesy corn chips. The world of social media, on the other hand, exists entirely in the realm of representation: abstract and conceptual, frequently divorced from reality. The correspondence of purchase to product collapses in its entirety, to a point where social media endorsement revolves entirely around ideas, with little correspondence to their real world counterparts.

Moving into the future, the key to success in social media advertising resides in how effectively a campaign allows users to define their own online images through quality, interactivity, and novelty. Going back to Doritos, their most recent efforts have been realized in the “Crash The Super Bowl” campaign, where users submit their own ads, with the winning submission to be aired during the Super Bowl. The contest embodies a perfect illustration of the potential of social media. Here users are provided with the opportunity to promote themselves while simultaneously promoting the product, and it all happens without a penny out of pocket from Frito-Lay.

Sitting at the renaissance of the advertising age, businesses must navigate their ships through an endless sea of self-promotion. The goal is to have the tides push you forward, rather than make waves of your own. In the marketplace of ideas, the question doesn’t revolve around how to sell to your audience, but rather, how to get them to sell for you.

#Mehran is now gluten-free, with 50% less trans fats than leading industry brand copywriters.